Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

The concept of legacy exists at the core of family business research, yet as a construct, the nature of what legacy is and why and how legacy matters across generations has been poorly understood (Hammond, Pearson, & Holt, 2016). This lack of conceptual clarity has limited legacy research in the domain of family business. In this article, we provide a comprehensive definition of legacy that can be used to draw connections across existing legacy research and open new avenues of inquiry critical to understanding both family firms and legacy itself.

Family firms are claimed to be long-term oriented and aim at preserving their non-financial business family objectives, which is also reflected in their employment behavior. While family firms’ behavioral and strategic responses to declining performance have received some academic attention, studies acknowledging family firm generational stage are rarer. In this article, we assess the “employment smoothing” hypothesis, according to which both first- and later-generation family firms restrain from laying off their employees despite financial pressure. We use statistical data from over 4000 Finnish companies to examine the differences in employment behavior between family and non-family SMEs and address the family firm’s generational stage. By differentiating between various phases of the financial crisis that peaked during 2008–2009, we explore several dimensions of employment variability, such as changes in the number of employees, within-firm time variation, and standard deviation in employment to test our hypothesis. We find that first-generation family firms are agile—they introduce changes swiftly by cutting their personnel at the start of financial pressure and restrain from doing so during later years. On the other hand, later-generation family businesses are more stable in their employment behavior than first-generation family businesses and non-family businesses—they introduce employment changes only after their profitability has remained at a lower level for a prolonged period following the start of the crisis.

Challenging the established notion that women at the top are consistently risk averse, this study combines insights from social identity and socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspectives to propose a novel view of risk preferences by women and men CEOs in family businesses. It reframes risk preferences as behavioral responses by gender and family (managerial) role expectations relative to social aspirations. An empirical test of Italian firms provides support for the hypothesized effects. For firms above social aspirations, women family CEOs take more risk as performance declines than their men family counterparts; this gap in risk preferences attenuates for men/women nonfamily CEOs. For firms below social aspirations, these effects are reversed. This study contributes to research on gender identity and risk-taking in family firms by showing that women and men do not always behave according to gender stereotypes. Rather, due to malleability of gender identity, they enact differing risk behaviors across contexts. In addition, it advances SEW theory by unpacking the effects of distinct SEW dimensions on firm risk by gender identity.

The purpose of this special issue is to advance the ongoing dialogue on gender diversity in family businesses and, more generally, encourage further research on individual distinctions to foster an inclusive milieu leading to greater equity, innovation, and organizational resilience. The studies in this special issue exemplify various aspects of gender diversity in family business, offering innovative perspectives to examine gender roles and representation within family businesses. Building on these articles, we offer a perspective that combines feminist theories with a social identity theory approach, going beyond the Business Case for gender equality and incorporating an emphasis on gender and power dynamics and identities. We conclude by proposing several future research directions to advance gender diversity studies in family business context.

This study investigates how daughter successors perceive that their entrepreneurial identities have been influenced by their fathers. Drawing on narrative identity and identity work theories and adopting an inductive and interpretive approach, we analysed interviews with 21 daughters. The findings reveal that their perceptions of their fathers can influence their entrepreneurial identities in multiple ways, concerning both why daughters become family business successors and how their entrepreneurial identities are shaped. To examine this variety of experiences, this study proposes a typology of four processes through which daughters’ entrepreneurial identities were formed (submission, self-empowerment, enhancement, and idealisation) and how they perceive their fathers’ role (commander, patriarch, mentor, and myth) in influencing these processes. This study contributes to the family business and entrepreneurial identity fields of research by showing that daughters’ perceptions of the role they ascribe to their fathers can be powerful mental representations that exert a great influence on their entrepreneurial identity.

In family businesses, women who belong to the owning family are increasingly appointed to leadership positions. Nevertheless, their managerial roles do not overlap well with their multiple family roles and family expectations, and they are often trapped in a “golden cage.” Drawing on a multilevel view of legitimacy, we analyze twenty-one in-depth interviews with CEOs, managing directors, and cofounders of family firms to untap the legitimation of women’s leadership. We propose a framework that explores the types of judgments (instrumental, relational, and moral) underpinning such a process. Our findings suggest that multiple role empowerment of women and exposure of daughters to family businesses increase legitimacy, whereas hiding family identities and role conflicts hinder it. The role carry-over that mothers have as chief emotional officers and an organizational context promoting gender equality indirectly contribute to the legitimation of women as leaders.

The initial work on family firm diversity research argued that family influence negatively moderates the board diversity–financial firm performance relationship, whereas more recent empirical evidence has suggested the opposite. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we investigate national culture (i.e., the degree of masculinity in the country of the firm) as a contingency factor influencing how tenure and gender board diversity translate into superior or inferior financial performance in family and non-family firms. Our analyses of 4192 firm-year observations of publicly listed European firms support most of our hypotheses. Our results show that the positive direct financial performance effects of tenure diversity are weakened in family firms, suggesting that the larger differences in values, goals, experiences, and power among family and non-family board members may suppress the benefits of cognitive variety. Furthermore, our results support that the degree of masculinity is an important factor moderating the diversity-family firm-financial firm performance relationship for gender and tenure diversity. We thereby advance diversity research in family firms to explain under what conditions positive or negative diversity effects prevail by introducing national culture as a novel contingency factor that may help to reconcile prior conflicting findings.

This paper investigates whether and to what extent strategy disclosure influences the cost of capital, comparing family and non-family firms and considering the proportion of women directors. We theorize that voluntary strategy disclosure may be either beneficial or detrimental depending on the perceptions by financial stakeholders about the role of governance attributes. These stakeholders might, indeed, assess strategy disclosure differently based on their stereotyped view of the family firm status and women’s involvement on the board of directors. By referring to a sample of 93 listed Italian small and medium-sized enterprises, we show that, unlike with their non-family counterparts, strategy disclosure increases the cost of capital for family firms. However, an increasing proportion of women directors softens this negative effect. Moreover, when a critical mass of women directors is appointed to the board, the strategy disclosure becomes beneficial for family firms too. We consequently offer a threefold contribution to the literature on gender diversity, family business and corporate voluntary disclosure.